The drugmaker penned a recruitment ad agreement with NAPSR, as the company looks to fill “nearly a thousand sales positions,” according to a release.

Calls to Novartis to obtain further details of the agreement went unreturned at press time.

Novartis is anticipating the approval of Galvus (type 2 diabetes) and Exforge (for hypertension) before the end of 2007's first quarter, chief marketing officer Kurt Graves said during UBS' Global Life Sciences conference in September.

“What we don't want to tell you is how we have set up our field force,” he said. “Every pharma company needs to come up with innovative go-to market strategies,” to be successful.